Never Mind Jim Duncan – Let’s See What the Kiosk Says: Richmond’s Long-Vanished Source for Weather Forecasting.

It’s getting hot in the Shockoe Examiner offices on the top floor of the Prestwould Apartments, high above Monroe Park. A staff member tilts his head toward our giant Kenmore window air conditioner, hoping to hear the compressor spin up and provide one more season of musty, barely cool air from the hulking 1970s machine. Satisfied that there is something coming out, he wipes his forehead, hoists a canvas bag, and pours out a huge mound of letters and emails from our numerous admiring and engaged readers and begins sorting them on his desk.

An undated postcard view of the Hotel Richmond with Richmond’s official weather kiosk in the foreground.

Another member of the staff is idly paging through Richmond postcards and stops at a view of the Hotel Richmond and the north-west part of Capitol Square. “Huh,” he says, “what’s this thing? It looks like a Victorian version of R2D2.” Indeed, in the foreground of the picture is a small structure decorated with Classical motifs, facing the Washington statuary group and located where the 1929 Zero Milestone is today. Tantalized, the Shockoe Examiner staff member called down to the Composing Room, twelve floors below, and told them to stop work on the latest edition of the Examiner. We held the presses until we could take a look at the United States Weather Bureau’s network of what were termed “weather kiosks” and the long-vanished example that once stood in Richmond.

A photo of the kiosk installed in Washington showing the instruments behind glass that recorded weather conditions.

In the early 1900s, the United States Weather Bureau was frustrated with the decimation of information regarding the weather, which often had to be transmitted by telegraph to newspapers and other outlets. Accordingly, Dr. Charles F. Marvin of that agency designed a “weather kiosk,” to be installed in prominent sites in major American cities, and Richmond’s was located in Capitol Square. The structure was made of cast iron and had panels on each side containing not only the latest forecasts and information from other weather stations but also instruments so Richmonders could see current rainfall counts, the temperature, and humidity.

The former United States Weather Bureau building in Chimborazo Park.

In 1909, the Weather Bureau (a division of the Department of Agriculture), built a headquarters in the center of Chimborazo Park, which provided information and the forecasts which were posted at the weather kiosk in Capitol Square. The building was used until 1953 and was deeded back to the City of Richmond the following year. In 1957 the former Weather Bureau building was given to the National Park Service and today serves as a regional headquarters for the Richmond Battlefield Parks system and a museum to interpret Civil War-era medical history.

A photo from the collection of the Library of Congress shows people crowding around the Washington, D.C weather kiosk in the heat of the summer of 1923.

At first, the weather kiosk was well regarded and depended on for a correct reading of conditions in Richmond and began being referred to as simply “the Kiosk,” in the same way we might quote a weather app today. On September 7, 1910, a Richmond newspaper ran the headline, “Kiosk Goes to 104 Degrees,” describing how “In the kiosk at Capitol Square at 3 P.M. the needle which zigzags its way across the street upon which it records with purple ink the varying temperature, ascended almost perpendicularly until it finally reached 104 degrees.” Soon, however, it became apparent that the position of the Kiosk, with its south-facing exposure in the heat of downtown Richmond and its cast iron construction, influenced its readings.

Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 6, 1912

The credibility of the kiosk was already in doubt by mid-summer 1912, when a Richmond newspaper flatly called the kiosk a malicious liar. “Observer Kiosk, in the language of a candidate for the presidency, is a plain liar of the garden variety. With the official diploma of the United States Weather Bureau to back up his claims, he has been practicing his nefarious claims upon innocent wayfarers in Capitol Square, with the bold abandon of one who grafts under the protective wings of the American eagle.”

On a brutally hot August day in 1912, the thermometer at the Chimborazo headquarters read 93 degrees in the shade, while the Richmond Times-Dispatch glumly headlined, “As Usual, the Kiosk Was Off,” and “Wayfarers through Capitol Square fled in dismay from the official register in the kiosk, which at 3:30 o’clock yesterday afternoon stood a fraction above the 100 mark.” In the brutal summer of 1914, “…the local branch of the Weather Bureau reporting 96 degrees, while the kiosk in the Capitol Square registered 104 degrees, which comes closer to the actual heat felt by the sweltering thousands.”

A detail from the postcard view, showing the Richmond weather kiosk.

By 1928, Richmonders had enough of their discredited weather kiosk. On December 12 it was reported that “The famous old weather bureau kiosk today was going the way of several other landmarks in Capitol square…It has not been used for several years except as an occasional bulletin board… The kiosk has never added anything to the beauty of Capitol square, being a very ugly little anachronism among the beautiful old statues and shrubby.” The newspaper admitted that many Richmonders remembered it kindly as a place they could get the weather news, but the instruments were removed from it some years before and now it only offered charts showing various cloud formations. “Today, only a large pile of ancient weather report cards, the accumulated junk of a generation, marked the resting place of the landmark.”

The largely-symbolic Zero Milestone, from which all distances to Richmond are supposed to be measured, stands today where the Weather Bureau kiosk was located in Capitol Square.

The kiosk was reported as having been removed “to Fulton,” but research has failed to uncover its final disposition and it has probably joined tons of interesting Richmond iron and stonework in the fill that smoothed the city’s valleys and hills.  By 1929, the obliteration of the memory of the kiosk was complete when it was reported that “The foundation was dug in Capitol Square today for a zero milestone to be erected by the State Highway Department on the site recently occupied by the kiosk of the United States Weather Bureau.”

 

The sole surviving Weather Bureau kiosk, installed in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1912. Google Earth

The weather kiosk, once a popular and important part of urban life in the early 1900s, was undone by inaccurate information but even more so by radio that brought accurate and timely weather forecasts into everyone’s home. The kiosk in Knoxville, Tennessee was the last one still standing and was sold by the city in 1933. It was decommissioned and spent the next seventy years in nearby Greenwood Cemetery until it was restored and returned to its original location in downtown Knoxville. It remains there today as a quaint artifact of an earlier kind of information age. Unfortunately, the final fate of Richmond’s much-maligned weather kiosk, once a well-known gathering place and part of the landscape of our Capitol Square, remains a mystery.

- Selden